Not everything in nature is useful

In the last post I showed the seeds and silky fibers that were being turned loose after the pod of an antelope-horns milkweed, Asclepias asperula, had split open. While photographing the spilled contents of the pod, I noticed that some of the seed-bearing fluff had gotten snagged on nearby plants, where it did neither species any good. You recognize that the other species in this case is Gaillardia pulchella, called firewheel or Indian blanket, at the stage where its seed head is beginning to dry out. Note the unusually sinuous stem leading to the spherical seed head. The orange patches in the background came from other firewheels that were still flowering.

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Profligacy, that’s what it is. I could tell you “Annie Dillard says nature is profligate”, but her extended metaphor from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is more fun. Your bit of fluff is a railroad engine!

“Say you are the manager of the Southern Railroad. You figure you need three engines for a stretch of track between Lynchburg and Danville. It’s a mighty steep grade. So at fantastic effort and expense you have your shops make nine thousand engines…

You send all nine thousand of them out on the runs. Although there are engineers at the throttles, no one is manning the switches. The engines crash, collide, derail, jump, jam, burn. At the end of the massacre you have three engines, which is what the run could support in the first place…

You go to your board of directors and show them what you’ve done. And what are they going to say? You know what they’re going to say. They’re going to say: It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

She goes on to offer the observation that it’s no better a way to run a universe. Maybe so, but it’s clear your little bit of fluff just jumped the tracks!

Thanks for A.D.’s extended profligacy analogy. In this case a locomotive strikes me as especially relevant, given the motivation of the feathered seeds to move in the least little breeze. I could also cast myself as a locomotive jumping the tracks of defined pathways to push through the underbrush in search of pictures, taking many, successful in far fewer. Now you’ve given me a rationale for my profligacy: I’m just imitating nature.

[…] In contrast to what you saw in different shades of red in this morning’s photograph, the wildflowers behind the sage shown here are Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels and Indian blankets, which still had a widespread presence around Austin on June 1 when I made this picture. Some of them continue flowering even now, though many have shed their flowers and turned to globes. […]